Wham-O factories were fun places, former workers recall

Photo courtesy of Wham-O
Wham-O quickly ramped up Southern California factories, this one thought to be in San Gabriel, in response to the 1958 Hula Hoop craze. The Hula Hoop became one of its most iconic toys.

As wacky as Wham-O's products were, it was almost as much fun to work there.

Rosie Martinez donned the goggles and masks and worked at a Wham-O plant in Rosemead for several years in the late 1970s. She stamped formed patterns, such as Smiley faces, onto the center of Frisbees and sent them down the assembly line.

"Boy, did I have fun," recalled Martinez, now a 52-year-old preschool teacher in Simi Valley. "All the things, all the different toys you got to see. I found that fascinating."

She remembered messages over the loudspeaker, advising employees of a new product they could take home and test.

Bruce Smith grew up with the famed Wham-O toys in the 1950s and 1960s, then spent the summer and fall in 1969 working for the company, first in the City of Industry and then El Monte, while he was a college student at Cal Poly Pomona. His memorable stint included working as Hula Hoop bender, forklift driver and draftsman, drawing Frisbee designs.

Bending Hula Hoops was monotonous, said Smith, a 58-year-old Ventura resident and longtime urban planner for the county of Ventura. In short, insert a wood plug into a precut plastic tube, bend the tube into a hoop, insert the other end of the plug and staple.

To pass the time, they'd crank up the radio tunes — "If it was an R&B song, we'd usually dance to it while we worked," he said.

As forklift operator, he spilled three boxes of Super Balls one day and "wasted an entire morning picking them up" all over the warehouse. That got him demoted back to the assembly line.

But as a draftsman, he got off the factory floor and saw the creative side of things.

"Who'd have thought that in a corporate office, you'd play Burnout Frisbee on Friday afternoons in the hallways with the bosses?" Smith remarked.

He liked the heavier black Frisbees, and took home the glow-in-the-dark models to his fraternity buddies. They'd be "out all night throwing them all over the place."

Smith said he carries fond memories from the brief Wham-O work experience, though he added, "I wouldn't want to ever bend a Hula Hoop again."